The Open Road (14 page)

In his typically coruscating late novel
Magic Seeds,
V. S. Naipaul sends his confused hybrid hero, W. Somerset Chandran, the drifting son of a self-styled Hindu wise man, an Indian Maugham perhaps, into the jungle to become a revolutionary and then into prison to enjoy the revolutionary’s fate. In prison, Willie is greeted by a sign saying,
HATE SIN NOT THE SINNER
, which, ever mixed up, he doesn’t know whether to ascribe to Gandhi or the Gospels. Later he meets other such slogans on the wall: “Truth always wins” and “Anger is a man’s greatest enemy.” Placebos of sorts, we are made to understand, that are no more substantial than the revolutionaries’s logans, used only to try to make the prisoners feel better. “To do good is the greatest religion,” “Non-violence is the greatest of all religions.”

All these “pieties,” as Naipaul calls them, are in fact not so different from statements of the Dalai Lama’s that are disseminated across the world—bromides, as it may seem, that tell people no more than any Golden Rule or Boy Scout’s manual might. The Dalai Lama knows, of course, that life is more complicated than such sentences, knows (to revert to the image of the body) that sometimes we do have to rely on one extremity more than another (as when we’re standing on tiptoe), knows that sometimes there are genuine differences between the parts (the mind hungry for the spicy Thai curry that the stomach distrusts). The little apothegms of his that get marketed on buttons and bumper stickers make no more sense than a single thread taken out of a Persian carpet, an intricate web, and pronounced to be beautiful. When once I mentioned a celebrated text on “The Paradox of the Age” found on T-shirts and posters everywhere (even in Tibetan temples), one of the man’s longtime translators could barely contain his impatience. “It’s nonsense!” he roared. “All these things you see ascribed to him, others are just making up!”

Yet the Dalai Lama, like anyone bringing a gift to a host, sees that it makes sense to bring only those things that the other person can use. Complex, technical Buddhism is of no value to typical non-Buddhists or beginners; indeed, it can take them away from the task at hand. People may get so caught up in the issue of whether mind exists that they ignore the hungry person knocking at their door. Nobel physicists in my hometown sometimes visit junior high school classrooms, and their intelligence there is measured not by how brilliantly they talk but by how simply.

The Dalai Lama, in any case, is not saying, “All you need is love,” and if he were, his own life would remind him of the inadequacy of mere good intentions. Tibetan temples do not swarm with wrathful deities for nothing, and even when one is told that the triumphal dances of skull-headed ghosts across their walls represent only the victory over ignorance and delusion, one cannot soon erase the images of violence. As Abraham Joshua Heschel, who constantly explored the paradoxes of the spiritual life through the twentieth century, has it, life is often war, and “a war which cannot be won by the noble magic of merely remembering a golden rule.” Reason, for Heschel, “is a lonely stranger in the soul, while the irrational forces feel at home and are always in the majority. Why bear hardship on behalf of virtue?”

I noticed, as I followed the Dalai Lama around, that he often got dismissed when he spoke in English, in compressed and simple terms, by people who had come expecting fireworks; and yet, conversely, when he took to the high road, in Tibetan, with intricate philosophical arguments worthy, as one Christian professor told me, of Aquinas, he generally got ignored. In six weeks of being in Dharamsala during one spring of daily teachings, I heard only two people talk about what the Dalai Lama was saying; the rest spoke more generally, as Tibetans might, of “presence” and warmth and goodness. Often, the easiest thing was to say that he spoke just with his person, his actions, making sure the old man at the back of the room was given a place to sit, cheerfully putting on an extremely unflattering orange-visored baseball cap while talking on “Stages of the Path,” as if to make himself seem less exalted or remote.

For myself, as someone born in the West and trained in some of the higher universities of skepticism, I often found it very difficult to follow the philosophical complexities that were his bread and butter. But as I looked around me in the streets of Dharamsala, or traveling to Yemen, to Bolivia, I sometimes did begin to see that discontent was the only reality we knew, and such possibility as we found would have to come out of it. As I sat at my desk, day after day, I really did find that everything was a product of my inner weather, the page that seemed so radiant yesterday looking dead and lusterless today. And as I thought about how I might better get on with the people I knew, my circumstances, I saw that everything really did depend on how I looked at it: call someone a friend, or turn to her better side rather than her lesser, and something useful might result.

One day, a little like my new friend Christian, I noticed that in the midst of a long disquisition on Tibetan history, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans had caught (before I did) the fact that my cup of tea was empty. I recalled that the person who had most vehemently challenged the prices charged for a Dalai Lama teaching was, in fact, the Dalai Lama. And I remembered that it was he who had once brought up to me the instance of his endorsing the later deranged Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara—which was proof, he said, that “I’m not a ‘Living Buddha’!” Something changed in me each time I left his company, even as I was telling my friends, heatedly, that humans never really change.

 

Below what we think we are

we are something else,

we are almost anything.

—
D. H. LAWRENCE

THE MYSTERY

O
ne day in Dharamsala, I woke up and went out while it was still dark. Dogs were running up and down the settlement’s muddy gullies and steep slopes, and along the narrow mountain road that winds down toward the valley figures could be seen moving quickly in clusters—Tibetans, I soon saw, loaded down with white scarves, and the outlines of monks. I followed them down through the darkness to the scramble of largely dilapidated buildings that mark the government in exile and its library—“Voice of Tibet (Voice for the Voiceless),” said one door, and “Tibetan Torture Survivors’ Program,” said another. Then I was at a small temple, between the yellow-walled library and the valley below, where a long line of mostly ragged pilgrims was snaking around the outside corridors.

I could have been in Tibet again, so unglossy and atavistic was the scene: toothless old men in cowboy hats made for the high plateaus, and women whose eyes seemed innocent of towns, unused to being in any buildings save ones like this. The long, winding trail of petitioners and nomads grew longer every second, while the blue-black sky across the valley began to pale, and the youngest monks of the temple, boys of seven or eight, began laboring past, carrying huge gray buckets and great swinging kettles, out of which they dispensed cups of Tibetan tea and clumps of rice.

Very promptly, at a few minutes before seven a.m., the large, gold-studded red doors of the temple swung back and the few foreigners in attendance (and almost no Tibetans, for some reason) were let into a small chapel, thick with the smell of melted butter and the usual, everyday furnishings of incense sticks protruding from cans of Coke and Fanta bottles. Maybe eighty or so in all pushed into the close space—the president of Kalmykia and his entourage seated cross-legged at the front—and only one Tibetan couple joined us, as wild-eyed and raw as the others. Very soon—I couldn’t help but notice—the woman was howling, rolling her eyes around and falling about in convulsions, while her husband, seemingly unconcerned, sat by her side as if this happened every day.

At the stroke of seven—things weren’t always so punctual in Dharamsala—a side door opened and one of the temple’s monks came out, with a few others in attendance. He looked to be an unusually mild and gentle sort. He stood beside the raised throne at the center—everyone was silent—and as he did, three attendants started affixing to his body layers of clothing, covered by a rich gold silk brocade, and attaching to his chest a circular mirrored breastplate, ringed with pieces of amethyst and turquoise. A silver quiver followed, and a three-foot-long silver sheath and sword; then a kind of harness, seventy pounds in weight (I would later learn), was placed on him, and a huge headpiece weighing thirty more pounds. The unwieldy figure—less a man, he now seemed, than a piece of walking regalia—was placed on the throne and strapped in, as it appeared: the odd impression was of an astronaut being prepared for a long and dangerous journey, less into outer than into inner space.

Then nothing happened. The quiet-faced monk sat where he was, absolutely still, his eyes closed, and for ten minutes or more—the whole room was silent—you could almost see him descend into himself. It was like nothing I had ever witnessed, as if we were watching him go down and down, into the inner reaches of the well that was his soul. It was as if he was gathering himself, collecting force, and disappearing before our eyes as he returned to whomever he was beneath the surface.

Then, without warning, the strange figure jerked back. He started moving of his own accord, convulsively; three monks raced in to grab and steady him, and he lurched to his feet and began shaking back and forth. The terrible, implausible impression was of a child in a tantrum, his face crumpled as if a balloon had been punctured. The lips and eyes were misshapen, so it looked as if he were sobbing after being denied a favorite treat. Then the figure began moving around spasmodically and jets of water issued violently from his mouth, the attendants dabbing his cheeks clean while the huge, barricaded presence shook himself out of their control.

The Tibetan woman who had been falling back onto the hard floor as if in a faint and shaking her head furiously was now reaching new levels of transport, rolling her head around and letting out bloodcurdling shrieks, audibly becoming someone else as the state oracle was set again on his throne and people began lining up to jostle past him and receive a blessing from the shuddering form. The hysterical woman was the first to come before him—was she possessed? was this a kind of fit?—and then the whole crowd pressed forward, every person extending a white scarf toward the figure on the throne and lingering for a moment or two before the clenched, puffing face, out of which still came jets of spit. Somehow, in his derangement, the man offered reflexive blessings to each white scarf that went past, and dropped little handfuls of brown seeds into every passing hand; then he stood up again, abruptly, and clattered through the hall, out onto the sunny outdoor terrace, where he sat down on his transported throne, in full view now of the great assembly of Tibetans, and began muttering words as bodies pushed and shoved about him.

The other monks took up positions around his seat, two crowding very close to relay what he was saying, while a third stood at attention and scribbled furiously, covering page after small page. The dictation seemed to go on and on, for ten minutes or more, and then, suddenly, the great caparisoned group stumbled back into the chapel and the great doors closed behind them. Whatever the deity who oversees Tibet wanted to convey through his human medium had been delivered.

The Dalai Lama uses his oracles (of which the most prominent is Nechung, whose trance we had just witnessed) as he might his left hand, he says, and he uses his Cabinet as he might his right, balancing visible and invisible worlds—the conscious and the subconscious realm—much as the Middle Way would suggest (though he also admits that he regards the medium who speaks for Tibet’s protector deity as his “upper house” and his regular political counselors as his “lower,” perhaps because the oracle speaks for a wisdom that is beyond the human, and beyond the reach of human meddling. It was Nechung, after all, who told him when he was only fifteen that he had to assume temporal power early, as the Chinese advanced into Tibet; and it was Nechung who told him in 1959 that he had to flee Lhasa—and gave him the route to do so—that very night). The Dalai Lama stresses that the oracle is in fact a healer and a protector, something more than just a spirit that can divine the future, but the fact remains that the spirit clearly lives in a domain very different from that of the lucid, analytical, doctor’s logic that marks the Dalai Lama’s mass public talks around the world.

Like any being, Tibetan Buddhism has a daylight and a nighttime side, a part that belongs in the public, visible world and a part that belongs to the realm of dreams and premonitions and everything that exists outside the conscious mind. Most of us associate the Dalai Lama with the daytime—waking up before it is light and going to sleep soon after the sun goes down—but when he sleeps, he readily admits, he enters a different part of his practice, one that reaches even into his dreams. As I watched him carry Tibet and its form of Buddhism around the world, I noticed that he always stressed the New Testament side of the tradition, as it were, more than the Old, downplaying the complexities that Heschel described and Job lived out in favor of more elementary and practical principles. He tended to shield the wider world from the esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism the way one might keep a loaded gun in a locked cabinet, so the kids don’t start to play with it and it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. But that did not change the fact that this more mysterious, nonrational side—the part that existed beyond the realm of mathematical formulas—remained as intrinsic to his practice as logic and debating; you have only to look at any Tibetan temple wall or
thangka,
swarming with skull-headed beings riding monsters, and copulating deities (the female figure milky white, the male more dark), or look at the mandalas nearby in which all visible and invisible worlds are distilled into a single mystical diagram, to realize that Tibetan Buddhism has taken the nonanalytical side of the tradition, as well as the analytical, to some of its richest extremes.